Cryptography Mailing List

Bitcoin v0.1 released

Hal Finney wrote:> > * Spammer botnets could burn through pay-per-send email filters> > trivially> If POW tokens do become useful, and especially if they become money,> machines will no longer sit idle. Users will expect their computers to> be earning them money (assuming the reward is greater than the cost to> operate). A computer whose earnings are being stolen by a botnet will> be more noticeable to its owner than is the case today, hence we might> expect that in that world, users will work harder to maintain their> computers and clean them of botnet infestations.

Another factor that would mitigate spam if POW tokens have value:there would be a profit motive for people to set up massivequantities of fake e-mail accounts to harvest POW tokens fromspam. They'd essentially be reverse-spamming the spammers withautomated mailboxes that collect their POW and don't read themessage. The ratio of fake mailboxes to real people could becometoo high for spam to be cost effective.

The process has the potential to establish the POW token's valuein the first place, since spammers that don't have a botnet couldbuy tokens from harvesters. While the buying back wouldtemporarily let more spam through, it would only hasten theself-defeating cycle leading to too many harvesters exploiting thespammers.

Interestingly, one of the e-gold systems already has a form ofspam called "dusting". Spammers send a tiny amount of gold dustin order to put a spam message in the transaction's comment field. If the system let users configure the minimum payment they'rewilling to receive, or at least the minimum that can have amessage with it, users could set how much they're willing to getpaid to receive spam.